On the relations of Fichte's life and works to theol- ogy and to the Christian Church, we make the follow- ing extracts from Hagenbach, (lerman Rdtionalisni (transl. b)' Gage and Stuckenberg, N. Y. 18G5): "It would certainly be doing Fichte injustice to .interpret his sj'stem to mean that he wished to make himself, J. G. Fichte, God. "We n-.ight say witli niore projirie- ty that Fichte, like Spinoza, denied the existence of God only in order to conceive him more spiritually ;
stripping off all associations of created things from the idea of the Creator, lest lie should be dragged down into the sphere of the finite. Tlie human mind is too apt to think of God in an anthropomorphitic manner. Fichte was a teacher of academic j'outh. At his feet sat many who were destined to proclaim to Christian congregations the God of the Gospel; a (lod who is only Creator if tliere are creatures of his creation, who has called a world into being, not as a visionary world, but as an actual and real one ; a world in which sin, misery, and affliction appear but too real, from vhich the mere imagination that thej' do not exit^t cannot save us, but which can only be removed by a higher reality, a divine fact, bj' God's act of love, as it ap- pears historically in the redemption through Chrift. If now the ground were taken from under the feet of those destined to proclaim such a doctrine, if nothing religious remained for them but their miserable Ego, of which they were not even as fully and energetically conscious as Fichte of his, must not many just scru- ples have arisen in the minds of those, too, who were not accustomed to restrain the freedom of investiga- tion hastilj' ? Hence Fichte was charged with no less an error than atheism, and to this day the learned are not agreed whether this oft-aljused term may be ap- plied to Fichte's sj'stem as represented in his Wissc-n- schaftslehre. To this must be added, as Fichte him- self remarks, that his democracy was as much a thorn in the eyes of his opponents as his atheism. The fact that he disregarded all established customs offended many. He chose Sunday for delivering moral lec- tures to the students. In this the Consistory of AVei- mar, of which at that time Herder was a member, thought they recognised the secret intention of gradu- alh' undermining puljlic worship, although Fichte protested solemnly against this, and appealed to the example of Gellert, whose moral lectures had also been delivered on Sunday, and why not then the phil- osophical lecture-room? The dispute ab.out reading lectures on Sundaj- was, however, only the prelude to a fiercer contest. Fichte published a woik On the Grounds of cur Faith in the Divine Government rf the World, in which the moral order of the world was de- noted as God, and the assertion was made that we need and can conceive of no otlier God. 'The exist- ence of this God cannot be doubted ; it is the most cer- tain of all things, and tlic ground of all other certain- ty ; but the idea of God as a particular substance is impossible and contradictor}-. It is proper to say this candidly to strike down the prating of the schools, so that the true religion of doing light cheerfully may be elevated.' Many pious minds, of course, took cfi'cnce at these expressions. Although Fichte might be sat- isfied with this moral order of the world, the Christian's faith in God, a faith, too, in 'doing light cheerfully,' but at the same time in a real God, could by no means be content with tliis philosophical theory. This faith would not, however, have been destroyed by this tlie- orv, even if no interdiction had been issued against it. Such an interdiction apjieared. The book in which Ficlite advocated the theorj' of the divine order of the world was attacked in the electorate of Saxony, and from this place the attention of the court at "\\'eimar was called to the dangers of Fichte's doctrine, ' as one not only openly hostile to the Christian, but even to natural religion.' ... It is remarkable in the case of Fichte that, after he had removed himself farthest from the common Christian feeling, he was led nearer and nearer it again. . . . After Fichte had called at- tention to the deep importance of faith, in the book Die Bestimmung des Menschen; after he had jjointed out the importance of Christianity 'as the onl_v true relig- ion' in the history, and the great importance of tlie Christian state, "in the Gnmd'J'ige des gegcnvdrtigen Zeifalters, he attempted, especially in his Anweisungen ztini seh'gen Lehen, oder lieVftionsh hre, to prove the agree- ment of his philosophy of that time with the principles
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FICINUS
of Christianity, which he regarded in a light entirelj^ different from Kant. Kant and the L'ationalists placed the csseucri of Christianit}' chiefly in morality and the fulfilment of the moral law, and, in accordance witli this, esteemed and used with a special predilection those passages in Scripture in whicli the various moral precepts are drawn in distinct outlines, as, for instance, the Sermon on the Mount, and several parables of Je- sus in the first three gospels (while they had no taste for John, who appeared to them a mystic) ; Fichte, on the other hand, threw himself on the fourth gospel, and regarded it as the only true source of the genuine doctrine of Christ ; he, of course, did this in a one-sided manner, and with a denial of the other truths of Scrip- ture, which belong fulh' as much to the totalitj' of Christian doctrine and historj' as the gospel of John. . . . The person of Jesus had with him a signification entirely different from that of the liationalists. He does not behold in him the teacher of morality, nor simply the moral example. No; exactly' that oneness with God, as Christ expresses it in the gospel of John, exact!}' that real unitij with (he Father which the Ra- tionalists desired to remove as a metaphysical formula of no use to moralitj', was to him the heart and the star of the Gospel. On this account he held himself so closely to John and his doctrine of the Logos hav- ing l)ecome flesh, in which he beheld the fulness of all religious knowledge. We should, however, make a great mistake if from this we concluded that Fichte agreed with the old orthodox doctrine in reference to Cln-ist. "What this doctrine regarded as a historical fact, which had occurred once, that Fichte regarded as a fact eternally repeating itself, as occurring in every religious man. Christ was not the Saviour to him in the old sense ; he was only the representative of that which is continually occurring still. ' The eternal '\\'ord becomes flesh at all times, in everj' one, without exception, who understands, in a living manner, his oneness with God, and who really yields liis entire in- dividual life to the divine life in living . . . quite in the same manner as in Christ Jesus.' ... In the house of the distinguished jihilosopher, eacli day, without ex- ception, was closed with proper and solemn evening devotions, in which tlie domestics were also accustom- ed to take a part. After several verses had been sung from a choral-book, accompanied with the clavichord, the fiither of the famih' would make some remarks on some passage of the New Testament, most frequently on his favorite gospel of John. In these discourses he was less concerned about moral applications and rules of life than about freeing the mind from the distraction and vanity of the common affairs of life, and elevating the spirit to the eternal." Dorner reg'ards Fichte as closing what he calls the period of "reflection" in phi- losophy by his theory of absolute subjective idealism ; and holds the later form of Fichte's teaching to be Spinozistic, as don^'ing the idea of a self-conscious God distinct from the world {Person of Christ, Edinb. transl., div. ii, vol. iii, 93 sq.\